The Veterinary Profession – Areas of Activity

Students who graduate from the program go on to work as licensed veterinarians. The veterinarian is not only responsible for helping to prevent, alleviate, and cure diseases and other conditions in animals. Veterinarians also work to maintain and develop healthy and high-performance animal and livestock populations and help to protect people from dangers and damage due to animal diseases and foods and other products of animal origin.

In the following sections you will find short portraits of possible areas of activity of veterinarians.

Links on this Topic: www.beruftierarzt.de

Treatment and preventive healthcare for dogs, cats, other pets, reptiles, and birds. Advising animal owners on matters of feeding, animal care and breeding, acting in an intermediary capacity for animal welfare and protection issues related to keeping animals, and preventing transmission of diseases to humans and other animals. Veterinarians who operate their own practices maintain close relations with their clients (animal owners) and typically treat patients at their practice during certain specific scheduled hours. Scientific activity of a theoretical or clinical and applied nature, conceptual design of research projects, publication of results of research, national and international contact with research institutions, training and educating students, self-qualification, patient care in clinical settings.

Caring for and maintaining a healthy, high-performance animal and livestock population, helping with production of healthy foods, depending on agricultural structures: in areas dominated primarily by small farming structures (such as the German states of Hesse and Bavaria), caring for a broad range of livestock animals (cattle, pigs, sheep, goats). This field requires that veterinarians be traditional all-around practitioners with broad-based veterinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, and less often veterinarians with specialized knowledge (decreasing), and in isolated cases also meat inspection. The situation is different in areas with highly specialized agriculture (such as the German states of Lower Saxony, Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), where practitioners focus more on caring for livestock populations within the scope of contractual arrangements (increasing).

Monitoring food, regulatory tasks in animal welfare and protection, fighting epizootic diseases and providing advice in case of epizootic diseases, monitoring the health of animal populations, and providing hygiene advice in production of animal-based foods. Predominantly product management for pharmaceuticals, processing of target group studies, market analyses, and consumer information (veterinarians and/or their target groups), seldom field research duties. Further activities in the feed and food industry, development and monitoring of food and feed. Structuring and restructuring of health services, advising government agencies on matters of public veterinary health, participating in designing veterinary education programs, providing advice on fighting epizootic diseases, providing advice on developing economical animal production and adaptation to meet standards (e.g., EU standards).

Scientific activity of a theoretical or clinical and applied nature, conceptual design of research projects, publication of results of research, national and international contact with research institutions, training and educating students, self-qualification, patient care in clinical settings.

Predominantly product management for pharmaceuticals, processing of target group studies, market analyses, and consumer information (veterinarians and/or their target groups), seldom field research duties. Further activities in the feed and food industry, development and monitoring of food and feed. Structuring and restructuring of health services, advising government agencies on matters of public veterinary health, participating in designing veterinary education programs, providing advice on fighting epizootic diseases, providing advice on developing economical animal production and adaptation to meet standards (e.g., EU standards).

Structuring and restructuring of health services, advising government agencies on matters of public veterinary health, participating in designing veterinary education programs, providing advice on fighting epizootic diseases, providing advice on developing economical animal production and adaptation to meet standards (e.g., EU standards).